Office365/ExQuilla dropping spaces / line breaks in messages

Since mid-September, we have been hunting a problem that occurs for our Thunderbird users when they attempt to send email via the Office 365 mail server.  It seems to be limited to just those using the ExQuilla plug-in, which gives access to messages/contacts on the Exchange server.

The symptoms are that in the body of the email, words will be run together without spaces between them.  It's not every word, but rather every 10th or 12th word where the spaces will be dropped.  The underlying cause of this seems to be a known issue at ExQuilla.

https://exquilla.zendesk.com/entries/83693609-Office365-removes-line-breaks-from-sent-emails

Kent James
posted this on Sep 23, 10:57

Beginning about September 17, 2015, we started receiving reports from ExQuilla users who used Office365 as a server, that sent emails have all line breaks removed, which appears as an issue to both the recipient as well as in the Sent Items folder.

You can also see this bug in action if you go to your "Sent Items" folder in Thunderbird, under your account that uses the ExQuilla plug-in.  Messages which were affected by the bug will have spaces missing in the copy that was saved to the "Sent Items" folder.

Now, other users have suggested a few workarounds to the issue, some of which are a bit tricky to implement, or require action to be taken on every single sent message.

I have an alternative fix:

1. Open up Thunderbird.
2. Go to the "Options" dialog.
3. Find the "Composition" tab.
4. Go to the "General" tab under "Composition".
5. Click on the "Send Options..." button.

In this dialog, you need to make sure that two things are done:

1. Make sure that the "Text Format" option says "Send the message in both plain text and HTML".
2. Under the "Plain Text Domains" tab, add an entry for "*.*".

After that, you should be free of the line-break bug that was introduced to the Office 365 environment.

Update 2015-10-01:  The problem has supposedly been fixed on the Microsoft side.  I'll have to do some testing to see whether it's gone for us.

Update #2 2015-09-28

Another user has now reported that a problem which used to exist has now disappeared due to a server update on Office365. If you are experiencing this issue, it will probably go away on its own when Microsoft updates the server.

Update #1 to Current frustrations with Thunderbird

Well, I started up Thunderbird in safe mode. If you have installed Thunderbird in the default location, that's as easy as pressing [Windows-R] (or Start, Run...) and entering the following:

C:\Program Files\Mozilla Thunderbird\thunderbird.exe -safe-mode

What I found is that, although the error still occurred, Thunderbird was a lot better about not hanging up while retrieving e-mail from large IMAP mailboxes.

So I'm going to uninstall most of my add-ons and see if I can make things work better. Disabling the add-ons didn't have any effect, so I think I'll have to completely remove most of them instead.

To give you an idea of what I consider "large". I have an IMAP account on our mail server that contains 17GB (2,000,000 messages) worth of e-mail. I have another two accounts that contain 1.7GB (40,000 messages) and 2.5GB (200,000 messages) respectively. However, none of the individual IMAP folders have more then 60,000 messages each. And most of the large folders only have 15,000 to 30,000 messages.

Current frustrations with Thunderbird

I'm currently plagued by the following showing up in my error console in Thunderbird 2.0.0.17 (20080914).

Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80550006 [nsIMsgFolder.getMsgDatabase]" nsresult: "0x80550006 ()" location: "JS frame :: chrome://messenger/content/mailWidgets.xml :: parseFolder :: line 2061" data: no]

The other thing that happens is that eventually, Thunderbird stops talking (hangs) to my IMAP mail server (over SSL). So I'm unable to send e-mail messages over SMTP/SSL (port 465), or am I able to retrieve any messages from our IMAP (Dovecot over SSL) server until I restart Thunderbird.

It can take anywhere from 5 minutes to 5 hours for this problem to occur. Starting in safe mode fixes some of the issue, but Thunderbird still chokes up after I've hit a few dozen IMAP folders to get new headers and to download messages.